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A mature couple who had been dating and decided to live together found themselves with three homes between them: a house upstate, a rented apartment in Brooklyn (hers), and a nondescript condo (his) on the third floor of a vintage row house. It hadn’t been upgraded since a developer’s schlocky renovation two decades ago. They decided to make the upstate place their primary residence, let go of her rental, and renovate his two-bedroom floor-through as an urban pied-à-terre.

Enter Studio Nato, a full-service interior design business based in Brooklyn, which refreshed and updated the space to make it “something they would want to live in together,” as Nathan Cuttle, founder and principal designer, put it. “The project started as a renovation, but we ended up doing the furnishings as well.”

Existing conditions were pretty crummy. “All the old moldings had been removed. There was recessed lighting everywhere that looked terrible, and a kitchen with cherry cabinets and a funky corner sink; you couldn’t stand at the sink and open the dishwasher at the same time,” Cuttle recalled.

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Studio Nato’s main aims were to make the place feel brighter, bring back some of the traditional feel that had been stripped away, create more storage and vastly improve the appearance and function of the bathroom and kitchen.

So out came much of the recessed lighting. In went new white oak floors throughout, new crown moldings and new window sills. Studio Nato cleaned up a phalanx of closet doors in the long hall, reorganizing coat and linen storage and laundry behind uniform painted MDF millwork that reaches almost to the ceiling and wraps around the corner into the all-new kitchen.

Also on the menu: new doors into the two bedrooms and the redone bath, painted Benjamin Moore’s Almost Black and fitted with new brass hardware.

The alcove off the front room, so common to row house apartments — “that little space nobody knows what to do with,” Cuttle said — became a reading nook lined with a new custom white oak bookcase.

Furnishings include vintage Danish armchairs and a copper end table/stool by Ohio-based designer Andrew Neyer.

A working wood-burning fireplace was one of the apartment’s pluses. Studio Nato wrapped the top half of the existing brick fireplace wall — “it absorbed all the natural light and made the apartment feel dark,” Cuttle said — with Sheetrock and painted the bottom half white.

They added a wood surround and tore out the brick hearth, replacing it with the same soapstone used on the kitchen island.

All new custom cabinetry in the neat, compact kitchen, painted white with mortised edge pulls, was sourced from South Carolina.

The island is white oak with a waterfall soapstone countertop. The backsplash tiles are from Clé, the Ambit pendant lights from Muuto and the bar stools from West Elm.

A 30-inch-wide Liebherr fridge saves space in tight quarters. The cooktop and wall oven beneath it are two separate elements.

In the long hall, Studio Nato “cleaned up a bunch of doors” and spec’ed painted MDF with routed grooves “for a bit of texture” on a continuous wall plane that conceals a wealth of storage and function. Round wood pulls do the trick.

The door to the bathroom is opposite. There’s a glimpse of the sofa in the guest room/home office at the end of the hall, with the main bedroom off to the left.

A dark-painted dado, or lower wall, distinguishes the main bedroom, with gleaming sconces from Allied Maker.

Like the rest of the apartment, the bathroom design is simple but polished. The custom vanity has Brizo wall-mounted faucets on a wall of white subway tile a bit less high than the brick-sized usual, with matte black hex tiles from Clé on the floor.

[Photos by Kate Glicksberg]

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The Insider is Brownstoner’s weekly in-depth look at a notable renovation and/or interior design project by design journalist Cara Greenberg. Find it here every Thursday morning. 

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